Thursday, December 14, 2017

Best of 2017: Yung Lean - Stranger

Four years after shrugging his way into the hip-hop conversation with the gauzy Unknown Death 2002, Jonatan Leandoer Håstad might be the most unsung young influencer in all of contemporary hip-hop. Though the connecting lines are arguably more dotted and circuitous than solid and straight, the emo wave of SoundCloud rap that brought us the likes of Lil Peep and Trippie Redd owes a certain spiritual debt to the Sad Boys movement. While Yung Lean and his like-minded cabal never quite blew up on Billboard, the miasmatic spread of this current, oft-Floridian sound into the charting mainstream nonetheless smells of his groundwork if not his actual handiwork. CoS